in a nose-bag. The Inns of Court and their environment are thronged with memories. To each his own thoughts, but for me Lincoln's Inn Fields has the most poignant association, for it was here that in 1586 Chidiock Titchbourne was executed, with others implicated in the Babington conspiracy. This gallant and great-hearted gentleman had no sympathy with the plot, yet rather than betray his friend, who had confided in him, he suffered a death as dire as crucifixion.

To the gabled houses which lent such grace to our streets the despoiler is equally ruthless. Wych Street is gone, with its "Rising Sun," and Holywell Street, where students rich and poor spent many an hour in handling books. In Cloth Fair there is still the gabled house of the Earl of Warwick, which has been used by a tallow chandler, and some remain in Aldgate, Clare Market, Cripplegate and Fetter Lane, but they are few and far between. It is possible, too, still to find an old city mansion with oaken staircase, panelled walls, carved chimney-pieces and decorated ceilings. One such, which had been used as a school-house, stood in Botolph Lane a year or two ago, hidden among the warehouses of Billingsgate, but now it has been demolished. For the most part the worthy citizens of London would seem to rejoice in the havoc. "Ah," one hears them say, "what a splendid clearance, what fine new buildings we shall have, what a broad, straight road!" It is the broad way that leadeth to destruction. When whole streets capitulate it must needs go hard with single buildings. Sometimes, as in the case of Sir Paul Pindar's house, their relics are placed in the museums, not far from the bones of extinct animals. Crosby Hall is to be divorced from the associations of Crosby Place, and erected on the Chelsea embankment. That it is saved as a specimen of the domestic architecture of the fifteenth century is due to

private generosity. Few things more saddening to lovers of the arts have occurred in recent years than the dispute over the fate of this noble relic of medieval London, which had escaped the Great Fire. The efforts of public bodies and of individuals to stay the work of demolition were unavailing, although at the outset the King expressed the hope that means might be found to preserve it.

Happily, not all the changes which are made are evil. Parliament Street is now a more stately avenue than when the lower end was cumbered with a dingy row of houses. The public offices which now stand there are worthy of their environment. Of the new War Office one can hardly speak with the like praise; in particular the four squat towers give to the building the semblance of an early Victorian dining table with legs in air. The pillars of the doorways, too, are broken at regular intervals with square stone blocks, which are fatal to symmetry. A pillar is as a tree, springing from the earth, graceful in line, it may be slender, yet strong to support arches of masonry, as the tree its spreading boughs. I have often wondered who it was that introduced into our midst this hideous fashion of building pillars with alternate cylinders and squares, which look as if built by a child from a box of bricks. But although the old-world charm of Whitehall is a little impaired by its proximity, the War Office is at least an imposing mass.

Within a year two buildings which all but faced each other, as if to suggest the poles of our society, were razed to the ground, Christ's Hospital and Newgate Prison. Of sluggish brain was he whose imagination was not quickened before the prison walls. Sinister and gloomy pile, strong to withstand assault and to withhold liberty, home of mental agony and sudden death, its grim stones had the dignity of retribution, the irony

of necessity. It was a work of genius by a man of talent, an enigma, unless Mr. Blomfield's theory be accepted, that it was designed while Dance was filled with the inspiration of Piranesi. The thickness of its walls, the rigour of its bars, were revealed at last in forbidding nakedness. Its extirpation was as complete as in days when razed cities were sown with salt, nay, the very foundations were dug out. Beneath them was found a bastion of the old Roman wall, whose dark stones, too, were uprooted, and for a while lay mingled with English bricks and mortar in one dust heap, symbol of the common lot.

"The tree of man was never quiet:

Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I."

Emotions of a different order are evoked by the loss of Christ's Hospital. It was a familiar possession of the citizens, who could not forbear to linger by the iron grating which separated the playground from the street and watch the sports of the blue-coat boys, that glimpse of the joy of youth through the bars of time. The lofty hall beyond was modern, but the Christ's Passage entrance, with its statue of the boyish king, was designed by Wren. As many relics as might be were removed to the new school at Horsham, but the old counting-house, the very picture of the merchant's office of a bygone day, the court-room, and the little flowering garden, which were almost unknown to the outer world, were doomed to vanish.

Much has been done already to portray these memorials of an older time, but the last decade has seen sweeping encroachments. It is with the intent of filling the gaps in our national records that these drawings of vanishing London by Mr. Hanslip Fletcher have been gathered into a portfolio. ARTHUR P. NICHOLSON.

THE WALLS OF ROMAN LONDON

THIS illustration shows a part of the Roman Wall of London,

which was exposed in 1903 when Newgate Prison was destroyed. It once formed a part of the western enclosure of the city. Still more recently a part of the wall has been found on the site of Christ's Hospital, connected with which were the remains of two semi-circular bastions. Several fragments of the wall on the northern and eastern sides of the city still exist, and its whole course from the Tower of London at the south-east to "London Wall" on the north and Blackfriars on the south-west is accurately known, and can still in large part be followed along the streets which ultimately surrounded the city outside the walls. The wall was about eight feet thick, built of small stones roughly squared on the outside and with much mortar in the interior of the mass. About every three or four feet, that is, after every six or eight courses of stonewalling, there were three courses of large Roman tiles, which very much strengthened the construction. The wall was probably about twenty-five feet high originally, and at intervals were projecting bastions. A ditch surrounded the city in mediæval times called Houndsditch, a name which survives in a street that runs over part of its course. It was crossed by wooden trestle bridges which led up to the gates. The Roman foundations of Newgate " were discovered together with the fragment of wall which it adjoined. At

Aldersgate evidence of the existence of a bridge has been found, so that is also known to be of Roman origin. Cripplegate, Bishopsgate, and Aldgate can be traced in records back to Saxon days, so that there is every probability that they also represent Roman Gates. With these facts before us we can to some extent imagine the appearance of the old walled city approached by the single, long and narrow bridge over the Thames.

Two points may be specially mentioned. As it has been found that some of the bastions were not bonded to the walls, it has been held that they were built at a later date. Choisy, however, the learned French writer on architecture, notes that, in the Roman Walls of French cities, the towers and the wall were often not bonded together. This, he says, was caused, either by a method of building, so as to allow each to settle independently, or under the sudden pressure of danger the curtain was first thrown around the town, and the bastions were added directly afterwards. Most of such fortifications in France, he says, were built on the approach of the barbarian invasions, and have the characteristics of haste and lack of method. Such Roman Walls in France, at Tours, Senlis, Angers, Bourges, etc., are very similar in every respect to the Wall of London.

The second point is the question of the age of the Wall. The type of the masonry, the fragments of sculptured stones which have been found imbedded in it, and the analogy with foreign walled cities, all go to show that the walls of London cannot have been built earlier than the Fourth Century. Rome itself was re-walled by Honorius, and this was probably part of the same general movement for strengthening the cities of the Empire.

W. R. L.